Chapter VII: Part TWO: The Place of Impulse in Conduct (2)

It is "natural" for activity to be agreeable. It tends to find fulfilment, and finding an outlet is itself satisfactory, for it marks partial accomplishment. If productive activity has become so inherently unsatisfactory that men have to be artificially induced to engage in it, this fact is ample proof that the conditions under which work is carried on balk the complex of activities instead of promoting them, irritate and frustrate natural tendencies instead of carrying them forward to fruition. Work then becomes labor, the consequence of some aboriginal curse which forces man to do what he would not do if he could help it, the outcome of some original sin which excluded man from a paradise in which desire was satisfied without industry, compelling him to pay for the means of livelihood with the sweat of his brow. From which it follows naturally that Paradise Regained means the accumulation of investments such that a man can live upon their return without labor. There is, we repeat, too much truth in this picture. But it is not a truth concerning original human nature and activity. It concerns the form human impulses have taken under the influence of a specific social environment. If there are difficulties in the way of social alteration--as there certainly are--they do not lie in an original aversion of human nature to serviceable action, but in the historic conditions which have differentiated the work of the laborer for wage from that of the artist, adventurer, sportsman, soldier, administrator and speculator.

IV

War and the existing economic regime have not been discussed primarily on their own account. They are crucial cases of the relation existing between original impulse and acquired habit. They are so fraught with evil consequences that any one who is disposed can heap up criticisms without end. Nevertheless they persist. This persistence constitutes the case for the conservative who argues that such institutions are rooted in an unalterable human nature. A truer psychology locates the difficulty elsewhere. It shows that the trouble lies in the inertness of established habit. No matter how accidental and irrational the circumstances of its origin, no matter how different the conditions which now exist to those under which the habit was formed, the latter persists until the environment obstinately rejects it. Habits once formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select, concentrate and organize the latter into their own likeness. They create out of the formless void of impulses a world made in their own image. Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.

Recognition of the correct psychology locates the problem but does not guarantee its solution. Indeed, at first sight it seems to indicate that every attempt to solve the problem and secure fundamental reorganizations is caught in a vicious circle. For the direction of native activity depends upon acquired habits, and yet acquired habits can be modified only by redirection of impulses. Existing institutions impose their stamp, their superscription, upon impulse and instinct. They embody the modifications the latter have undergone. How then can we get leverage for changing institutions? How shall impulse exercise that re-adjusting office which has been claimed for it? Shall we not have to depend in the future as in the past upon upheaval and accident to dislocate customs so as to release impulses to serve as points of departure for new habits?

The existing psychology of the industrial worker for example is slack, irresponsible, combining a maximum of mechanical routine with a maximum of explosive, unregulated impulsiveness. These things have been bred by the existing economic system. But they exist, and are formidable obstacles to social change. We cannot breed in men the desire to get something for as nearly nothing as possible and in the end not pay the price. We satisfy ourselves cheaply by preaching the charm of productivity and by blaming the inherent selfishness of human nature, and urging some great moral and religious revival. The evils point in reality to the necessity of a change in economic institutions, but meantime they offer serious obstacles to the change. At the same time, the existing economic system has enlisted in behalf of its own perpetuity the managerial and the technological abilities which must serve the cause of the laborer if he is to be emancipated. In the face of these difficulties other persons seek an equally cheap satisfaction in the thought of universal civil war and revolution.

Is there any way out of the vicious circle? In the first place, there are possibilities resident in the education of the young which have never yet been taken advantage of. The idea of universal education is as yet hardly a century old, and it is still much more of an idea than a fact, when we take into account the early age at which it terminates for the mass. Also, thus far schooling has been largely utilized as a convenient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic regimes. Hence it is easy to point out defects and perversions in every existing school system. It is easy for a critic to ridicule the religious devotion to education which has characterized for example the American republic. It is easy to represent it as zeal without knowledge, fanatical faith apart from understanding. And yet the cold fact of the situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded, economical improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportunities of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire.

The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established customs. Their life of impulsive activity is vivid, flexible, experimenting, curious. Adults have their habits formed, fixed, at least comparatively. They are the subjects, not to say victims, of an environment which they can directly change only by a maximum of effort and disturbance. They may not be able to perceive clearly the needed changes, or be willing to pay the price of effecting them. Yet they wish a different life for the generation to come. In order to realize that wish they may create a special environment whose main function is education. In order that education of the young be efficacious in inducing an improved society, it is not necessary for adults to have a formulated definite ideal of some better state. An educational enterprise conducted in this spirit would probably end merely in substituting one rigidity for another. What is necessary is that habits be formed which are more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more informed with foresight, more aware of what they are about, more direct and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current. Then they will meet their own problems and propose their own improvements.

Educative development of the young is not the only way in which the life of impulse may be employed to effect social ameliorations, though it is the least expensive and most orderly. No adult environment is all of one piece. The more complex a culture is, the more certain it is to include habits formed on differing, even conflicting patterns. Each custom may be rigid, unintelligent in itself, and yet this rigidity may cause it to wear upon others. The resulting attrition may release impulse for new adventures. The present time is conspicuously a time of such internal frictions and liberations. Social life seems chaotic, unorganized, rather than too fixedly regimented. Political and legal institutions are now inconsistent with the habits that dominate friendly intercourse, science and art. Different institutions foster antagonistic impulses and form contrary dispositions.

If we had to wait upon exhortations and unembodied "ideals" to effect social alterations, we should indeed wait long. But the conflict of patterns involved in institutions which are inharmonious with one another is already producing great changes. The significant point is not whether modifications shall continue to occur, but whether they shall be characterized chiefly by uneasiness, discontent and blind antagonistic struggles, or whether intelligent direction may modulate the harshness of conflict, and turn the elements of disintegration into a constructive synthesis. At all events, the social situation in "advanced" countries is such as to impart an air of absurdity to our insistence upon the rigidity of customs. There are plenty of persons to tell us that the real trouble lies in lack of fixity of habit and principle; in departure from immutable standards and structures constituted once for all. We are told that we are suffering from an excess of instinct, and from laxity of habit due to surrender to impulse as a law of life. The remedy is said to be to return from contemporary fluidity to the stable and spacious patterns of a classic antiquity that observed law and proportion: for somehow antiquity is always classic. When instability, uncertainty, erratic change are diffused throughout the situation, why dwell upon the evils of fixed habit and the need of release of impulse as an initiator of reorganizations? Why not rather condemn impulse and exalt habits of reverencing order and fixed truth?

The question is natural, but the remedy suggested is futile. It is not easy to exaggerate the extent to which we now pass from one kind of nurture to another as we go from business to church, from science to the newspaper, from business to art, from companionship to politics, from home to school. An individual is now subjected to many conflicting schemes of education. Hence habits are divided against one another, personality is disrupted, the scheme of conduct is confused and disintegrated. But the remedy lies in the development of a new morale which can be attained only as released impulses are intelligently employed to form harmonious habits adapted to one another in a new situation. A laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected by exhortations to restore old habits in their former rigidity. Even though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. And it is not desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration. Plaintive lamentations at the prevalence of change and abstract appeals for restoration of senile authority are signs of personal feebleness, of inability to cope with change. It is a "defense reaction."

V

We may sum up the discussion in a few generalized statements. In the first place, it is unscientific to try to restrict original activities to a definite number of sharply demarcated classes of instincts. And the practical result of this attempt is injurious. To classify is, indeed, as useful as it is natural. The indefinite multitude of particular and changing events is met by the mind with acts of defining, inventorying and listing, reducing to common heads and tying up in bunches. But these acts like other intelligent acts are performed for a purpose, and the accomplishment of purpose is their only justification. Speaking generally, the purpose is to facilitate our dealings with unique individuals and changing events. When we assume that our clefts and bunches represent fixed separations and collections _in rerum natura_, we obstruct rather than aid our transactions with things. We are guilty of a presumption which nature promptly punishes. We are rendered incompetent to deal effectively with the delicacies and novelties of nature and life. Our thought is hard where facts are mobile; bunched and chunky where events are fluid, dissolving.

The tendency to forget the office of distinctions and classifications, and to take them as marking things in themselves, is the current fallacy of scientific specialism. It is one of the conspicuous traits of highbrowism, the essence of false abstractionism. This attitude which once flourished in physical science now governs theorizing about human nature. Man has been resolved into a definite collection of primary instincts which may be numbered, catalogued and exhaustively described one by one. Theorists differ only or chiefly as to their number and ranking. Some say one, self-love; some two, egoism and altruism; some three, greed, fear and glory; while today writers of a more empirical turn run the number up to fifty and sixty. But in fact there are as many specific reactions to differing stimulating conditions as there is time for, and our lists are only classifications for a purpose.

One of the great evils of this artificial simplification is its influence upon social science. Complicated provinces of life have been assigned to the jurisdiction of some special instinct or group of instincts, which has reigned despotically with the usual consequences of despotism. Politics has replaced religion as the set of phenomena based upon fear; or after having been the fruit of a special Aristotelian political faculty, has become the necessary condition of restraining man's self-seeking impulse. All sociological facts are disposed of in a few fat volumes as products of imitation and invention, or of cooperation and conflict. Ethics rest upon sympathy, pity, benevolence. Economics is the science of phenomena due to one love and one aversion--gain and labor. It is surprising that men can engage in these enterprises without being reminded of their exact similarity to natural science before scientific method was discovered in the seventeenth century. Just now another simplification is current. All instincts go back to the sexual, so that _cherchez la femme_ (under multitudinous symbolic disguises) is the last word of science with respect to the analysis of conduct.

Some sophisticated simplifications which once had great influence are now chiefly matters of historic moment. Even so they are instructive. They show how social conditions put a heavy load on certain tendencies, so that in the end an acquired disposition is treated as if it were an original, and almost the only original activity. Consider, for example, the burden of causal power placed by Hobbes upon the reaction of fear. To a man living with reasonable security and comfort today, Hobbes' pervasive consciousness of fear seems like the idiosyncrasy of an abnormally timid temperament. But a survey of the conditions of his own time, of the disorders which bred general distrust and antagonism, which led to brutal swashbuckling and disintegrating intrigue, puts the matter on a different footing. The social situation conduced to fearfulness. As an account of the psychology of the natural man his theory is unsound. As a report of contemporary social conditions there is much to be said for it.

Something of the same sort may be said regarding the emphasis of eighteenth century moralists upon benevolence as the inclusive moral spring to action, an emphasis represented in the nineteenth century by Comte's exaltation of altruism. The load was excessive. But it testifies to the growth of a new philanthropic spirit. With the breaking down of feudal barriers and a consequent mingling of persons previously divided, a sense of responsibility for the happiness of others, for the mitigation of misery, grew up. Conditions were not ripe for its translation into political action. Hence the importance attached to the private disposition of voluntary benevolence.

If we venture into more ancient history, Plato's threefold division of the human soul into a rational element, a spirited active one, and an appetitive one, aiming at increase or gain, is immensely illuminating. As is well known, Plato said that society is the human soul writ large. In society he found three classes: the philosophic and scientific, the soldier-citizenry, and the traders and artisans. Hence the generalization as to the three dominating forces in human nature. Read the other way around, we perceive that trade in his days appealed especially to concupiscence, citizenship to a generous _élan_ of self-forgetting loyalty, and scientific study to a disinterested love of wisdom that seemed to be monopolized by a small isolated group. The distinctions were not in truth projected from the breast of the natural individual into society, but they were cultivated in classes of individuals by force of social custom and expectation.

Now the prestige that once attached to the "instinct" of self-love has not wholly vanished. The case is still worth examination. In its "scientific" form, start was taken from an alleged instinct of self-preservation, characteristic of man as well as of other animals. From this seemingly innocuous assumption, a mythological psychology burgeoned. Animals, including man, certainly perform many acts whose consequence is to protect and preserve life. If their acts did not upon the whole have this tendency, neither the individual or the species would long endure. The acts that spring from life also in the main conserve life. Such is the undoubted fact. What does the statement amount to? Simply the truism that life is life, that life is a continuing activity as long as it is life at all. But the self-love school converted the fact that life tends to maintain life into a separate and special force which somehow lies back of life and accounts for its various acts. An animal exhibits in its life-activity a multitude of acts of breathing, digesting, secreting, excreting, attack, defense, search for food, etc., a multitude of specific responses to specific stimulations of the environment. But mythology comes in and attributes them all to a nisus for self-preservation. Thence it is but a step to the idea that all conscious acts are prompted by self-love. This premiss is then elaborated in ingenious schemes, often amusing when animated by a cynical knowledge of the "world," tedious when of a would-be logical nature, to prove that every act of man including his apparent generosities is a variation played on the theme of self-interest.

The fallacy is obvious. Because an animal cannot live except as it is alive, except that is as its acts have the result of sustaining life, it is concluded that all its acts are instigated by an impulse to self-preservation. Since all acts affect the well-being of their agent in one way or another, and since when a person becomes reflective he prefers consequences in the way of weal to those of woe, therefore all his acts are due to self-love. In actual substance, one statement says that life is life; and the other says that a self is a self. One says that special acts are acts of a living creature and the other that they are acts of a self. In the biological statement the concrete diversity between the acts of say a clam and of a dog are covered up by pointing out that the acts of each tend to self-preservation, ignoring the somewhat important fact that in one case it is the life of a clam and in the other the life of a dog which is continued. In morals, the concrete differences between a Jesus, a Peter, a John and a Judas are covered up by the wise remark that after all they are all selves and all act as selves. In every case, a result or "end" is treated as an actuating cause.

The fallacy consists in transforming the (truistic) fact of acting _as_ a self into the fiction of acting always _for_ self. Every act, truistically again, tends to a certain fulfilment or satisfaction of some habit which is an undoubted element in the structure of character. Each satisfaction is qualitatively what it is because of the disposition fulfilled in the object attained, treachery or loyalty, mercy or cruelty. But theory comes in and blankets the tremendous diversity in the quality of the satisfactions which are experienced by pointing out that they are all satisfactions. The harm done is then completed by transforming this artificial unity of result into an original love of satisfaction as the force that generates all acts alike. Because a Nero and a Peabody both get satisfaction in acting as they do it is inferred that the satisfaction of each is the same in quality, and that both were actuated by love of the same objective. In reality the more we concretely dwell upon the common fact of fulfilment, the more we realize the difference in the kinds of selves fulfilled. In pointing out that both the north and the south poles are poles we do not abolish the difference of north from south; we accentuate it.

The explanation of the fallacy is however too easy to be convincing. There must have been some material, empirical reason why intelligent men were so easily entrapped by a fairly obvious fallacy. That material error was a belief in the fixity and simplicity of the self, a belief which had been fostered by a school far removed from the one in question, the theologians with their dogma of the unity and ready-made completeness of the soul. We arrive at true conceptions of motivation and interest only by the recognition that selfhood (except as it has encased itself in a shell of routine) is in process of making, and that any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions. Even a Nero may be capable upon occasion of acts of kindness. It is even conceivable that under certain circumstances he may be appalled by the consequences of cruelty, and turn to the fostering of kindlier impulses. A sympathetic person is not immune to harsh arrogances, and he may find himself involved in so much trouble as a consequence of a kindly act, that he allows his generous impulses to shrivel and henceforth governs his conduct by the dictates of the strictest worldly prudence. Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience. Only the hold of a traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-made self behind activities. There are complex, unstable, opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which gradually come to terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of configuration, even though only by means of a distribution of inconsistencies which keeps them in water-tight compartments, giving them separate turns or tricks in action.

Many good words get spoiled when the word self is prefixed to them: Words like pity, confidence, sacrifice, control, love. The reason is not far to seek. The word self infects them with a fixed introversion and isolation. It implies that the act of love or trust or control is turned back upon a self which already is in full existence and in whose behalf the act operates. Pity fulfils and creates a self when it is directed outward, opening the mind to new contacts and receptions. Pity for self withdraws the mind back into itself, rendering its subject unable to learn from the buffetings of fortune. Sacrifice may enlarge a self by bringing about surrender of acquired possessions to requirements of new growth. Self-sacrifice means a self-maiming which asks for compensatory pay in some later possession or indulgence. Confidence as an outgoing act is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life, trusting them to bring instruction and support to a developing self. Confidence which terminates in the self means a smug complacency that renders a person obtuse to instruction by events. Control means a command of resources that enlarges the self; self-control denotes a self which is contracting, concentrating itself upon its own achievements, hugging them tight, and thereby estopping the growth that comes when the self is generously released; a self-conscious moral athleticism that ends in a disproportionate enlargement of some organ.

What makes the difference in each of these cases is the difference between a self taken as something already made and a self still making through action. In the former case, action has to contribute profit or security or consolation _to_ a self. In the latter, impulsive action becomes an adventure in discovery of a self which is possible but as yet unrealized, an experiment in creating a self which shall be more inclusive than the one which exists. The idea that only those impulses have moral validity which aim at the welfare of others, or are altruistic, is almost as one-sided a doctrine as the dogma of self-love. Yet altruism has one marked superiority; it at least suggests a generosity of outgoing action, a liberation of power as against the close, pent in, protected atmosphere of a ready-made ego.

The reduction of all impulses to forms of self-love is worth investigation because it gives an opportunity to say something about self as an ongoing process. The doctrine itself is faded, its advocates are belated. The notion is too tame to appeal to a generation that has experienced romanticism and has been intoxicated by imbibing from the streams of power released by the industrial revolution. The fashionable unification of today goes by the name of the will to power.

In the beginning, this is hardly more than a name for a quality of all activity. Every fulfilled activity terminates in added control of conditions, in an art of administering objects. Execution, satisfaction, realization, fulfilment are all names for the fact that an activity implies an accomplishment which is possible only by subduing circumstance to serve as an accomplice of achievement. Each impulse or habit is thus a will to its _own_ power. To say this is to clothe a truism in a figure. It says that anger or fear or love or hate is successful when it effects some change outside the organism which measures its force and registers its efficiency. The achieved outcome marks the difference between action and a cooped-up sentiment which is expended upon itself. The eye hungers for light, the ear for sound, the hand for surfaces, the arm for things to reach, throw and lift, the leg for distance, anger for an enemy to destroy, curiosity for something to shiver and cower before, love for a mate. Each impulse is a demand for an object which will enable it to function. Denied an object in reality it tends to create one in fancy, as pathology shows.

So far we have no generalized will to power, but only the inherent pressure of every activity for an adequate manifestation. It is not so much a demand for power as search for an opportunity to use a power already existing. If opportunities corresponded to the need, a desire _for_ power would hardly arise: power would be used and satisfaction would accrue. But impulse is balked. If conditions are right for an educative growth, the snubbed impulse will be "sublimated." That is, it will become a contributory factor in some more inclusive and complex activity, in which it is reduced to a subordinate yet effectual place. Sometimes however frustration dams activity up, and intensifies it. A longing for satisfaction at any cost is engendered. And when social conditions are such that the path of least resistance lies through subjugation of the energies of others, the will to power bursts into flower.

This explains why we attribute a will to power to others but not to ourselves, except in the complimentary sense that being strong we naturally wish to exercise our strength. Otherwise for ourselves we only want what we want when we want it, not being overscrupulous about the means we take to get it. This psychology is naive but it is truer to facts than the supposition that there exists by itself as a separate and original thing a will to power. For it indicates that the real fact is some existing power which demands outlet, and which becomes self-conscious only when it is too weak to overcome obstacles. Conventionally the will to power is imputed only to a comparatively small number of ambitious and ruthless men. They are probably upon the whole quite unconscious of any such will, being mastered by specific intense impulses that find their realization most readily by bending others to serve as tools of their aims. Self-conscious will to power is found mainly in those who have a so-called inferiority complex, and who would compensate for a sense of personal disadvantage (acquired early in childhood) by making a striking impression upon others, in the reflex of which they feel their strength appreciated. The literateur who has to take his action out in imagination is much more likely to evince a will to power than a Napoleon who sees definite objects with extraordinary clearness and who makes directly for them. Explosive irritations, naggings, the obstinacy of weak persons, dreams of grandeur, the violence of those usually submissive are the ordinary marks of a will to power.

Discussion of the false simplification involved in this doctrine suggests another unduly fixed and limited classification. Critics of the existing economic regime have divided instincts into the creative and the acquisitive, and have condemned the present order because it embodies the latter at the expense of the former. The division is convenient, yet mistaken. Convenient because it sums up certain facts of the present system, mistaken because it takes social products for psychological originals. Speaking roughly we may say that native activity is both creative and acquisitive, creative as a process, acquisitive in that it terminates as a rule in some tangible product which brings the process to consciousness of itself.

Activity is creative in so far as it moves to its own enrichment as activity, that is, bringing along with itself a release of further activities. Scientific inquiry, artistic production, social companionship possess this trait to a marked degree; some amount of it is a normal accompaniment of all successfully coordinated action. While from the standpoint of what precedes it is a fulfilment, it is a liberative expansion with respect to what comes after. There is here no antagonism between creative expression and the production of results which endure and which give a sense of accomplishment. Architecture at its best, for example, would probably appear to most persons to be _more_ creative, not less, than dancing at its best. There is nothing in industrial production which of necessity excludes creative activity. The fact that it terminates in tangible utilities no more lowers its status than the uses of a bridge exclude creative art from a share in its design and construction. What requires explanation is why process is so definitely subservient to product in so much of modern industry:--that is, why later use rather than present achieving is the emphatic thing. The answer seems to be twofold.

An increasingly large portion of economic work is done with machines. As a rule, these machines are not under the personal control of those who operate them. The machines are operated for ends which the worker has no share in forming and in which as such, or apart from his wage, he has no interest. He neither understands the machines nor cares for their purpose. He is engaged in an activity in which means are cut off from ends, instruments from what they achieve. Highly mechanized activity tends as Emerson said to turn men into spiders and needles. But if men understand what they are about, if they see the whole process of which their special work is a necessary part, and if they have concern, care, for the whole, then the mechanizing effect is counteracted. But when a man is only the tender of a machine, he can have no insight and no affection; creative activity is out of the question.

What remains to the workman is however not so much acquisitive desires as love of security and a wish for a good time. An excessive premium on security springs from the precarious conditions of the workman; desire for a good time, so far as it needs any explanation, from demand for relief from drudgery, due to the absence of culturing factors in the work done. Instead of acquisition being a primary end, the net effect of the process is rather to destroy sober care for materials and products; to induce careless wastefulness, so far as that can be indulged in without lessening the weekly wage. From the standpoint of orthodox economic theory, the most surprising thing about modern industry is the small number of persons who have any effective interest in acquisition of wealth. This disregard for acquisition makes it easier for a few who do want to have things their own way, and who monopolize what is amassed. If an acquisitive impulse were only more evenly developed, more of a real fact, than it is, it is quite possible that things would be better than they are.

Even with respect to men who succeed in accumulating wealth it is a mistake to suppose that acquisitiveness plays with most of them a large rôle, beyond getting control of the tools of the game. Acquisition is necessary as an outcome, but it arises not from love of accumulation but from the fact that without a large stock of possessions one cannot engage effectively in modern business. It is an incident of love of power, of desire to impress fellows, to obtain prestige, to secure influence, to manifest ability, to "succeed" in short under the conditions of the given regime. And if we are to shove a mythological psychology of instincts behind modern economics, we should do better to invent instincts for security, a good time, power and success than to rely upon an acquisitive instinct. We should have also to give much weight to a peculiar sporting instinct. Not acquiring dollars, but chasing them, hunting them is the important thing. Acquisition has its part in the big game, for even the most devoted sportsman prefers, other things being equal, to bring home the fox's brush. A tangible result is the mark to one's self and to others of success in sport.

Instead of dividing sharply an acquisitive impulse manifested in business and a creative instinct displayed in science, art and social fellowship, we should rather first inquire why it is that so much of creative activity is in our day diverted into business, and then ask why it is that opportunity for exercise of the creative capacity in business is now restricted to such a small class, those who have to do with banking, finding a market, and manipulating investments; and finally ask why creative activity is perverted into an over-specialized and frequently inhumane operation. For after all it is not the bare fact of creation but its quality which counts.

That captains of industry are creative artists of a sort, and that industry absorbs an undue share of the creative activity of the present time cannot be denied. To impute to the leaders of industry and commerce simply an acquisitive motive is not merely to lack insight into their conduct, but it is to lose the clew to bettering conditions. For a more proportionate distribution of creative power between business and other occupations, and a more humane, wider use of it in business depend upon grasping aright the forces actually at work. Industrial leaders combine interest in making far-reaching plans, large syntheses of conditions based upon study, mastery of refined and complex technical skill, control over natural forces and events, with love of adventure, excitement and mastery of fellow-men. When these interests are reinforced with actual command of all the means of luxury, of display and procuring admiration from the less fortunate, it is not surprising that creative force is drafted largely into business channels, and that competition for an opportunity to display power becomes brutal.

The strategic question, as was said, is to understand how and why political, legal, scientific and educational conditions of society for the last centuries have stimulated and nourished such a one-sided development of creative activities. To approach the problem from this point of view is much more hopeful, though infinitely more complex intellectually, than the approach which sets out with a fixed dualism between acquisitive and creative impulses. The latter assumes a complete split of higher and lower in the original constitution of man. Were this the case, there would be no organic remedy. The sole appeal would be to sentimental exhortation to men to wean themselves from devotion to the things which are beloved by their lower and material nature. And if the appeal were moderately successful the social result would be a fixed class division. There would remain a lower class, superciliously looked down upon by the higher, consisting of those in whom the acquisitive instinct remains stronger and who do the necessary work of life, while the higher "creative" class devotes itself to social intercourse, science and art.

Since the underlying psychology is wrong, the problem and its solution assumes in fact a radically different form. There are an indefinite number of original or instinctive activities, which are organized into interests and dispositions according to the situations to which they respond. To increase the creative phase and the humane quality of these activities is an affair of modifying the social conditions which stimulate, select, intensify, weaken and coordinate native activities. The first step in dealing with it is to increase our detailed scientific knowledge. We need to know exactly the selective and directive force of each social situation; exactly how each tendency is promoted and retarded. Command of the physical environment on a large and deliberate scale did not begin until belief in gross forces and entities was abandoned. Control of physical energies is due to inquiry which establishes specific correlations between minute elements. It will not be otherwise with social control and adjustment. Having the knowledge we may set hopefully at work upon a course of social invention and experimental engineering. A study of the educative effect, the influence upon habit, of each definite form of human intercourse, is prerequisite to effective reform.

VI

In spite of what has been said, it will be asserted that there are definite, independent, original instincts which manifest themselves in specific acts in a one-to-one correspondence. Fear, it will be said, is a reality, and so is anger, and rivalry, and love of mastery of others, and self-abasement, maternal love, sexual desire, gregariousness and envy, and each has its own appropriate deed as a result. Of course they are realities. So are suction, rusting of metals, thunder and lightning and lighter-than-air flying machines. But science and invention did not get on as long as men indulged in the notion of special forces to account for such phenomena. Men tried that road, and it only led them into learned ignorance. They spoke of nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; of a force of combustion; of intrinsic nisus toward this and that; of heaviness and levity as forces. It turned out that these "forces" were only the phenomena over again, translated from a specific and concrete form (in which they were at least actual) into a generalized form in which they were verbal. They converted a problem into a solution which afforded a simulated satisfaction.

Advance in insight and control came only when the mind turned squarely around. After it had dawned upon inquirers that their alleged causal forces were only names which condensed into a duplicate form a variety of complex occurrences, they set about breaking up phenomena into minute detail and searching for correlations, that is, for elements in other gross phenomena which also varied. Correspondence of variations of elements took the place of large and imposing forces. The psychology of behavior is only beginning to undergo similar treatment. It is probable that the vogue of sensation-psychology was due to the fact that it seemed to promise a similar detailed treatment of personal phenomena. But as yet we tend to regard sex, hunger, fear, and even much more complex active interests as if they were lump forces, like the combustion or gravity of old-fashioned physical science.

It is not hard to see how the notion of a single and separate tendency grew up in the case of simpler acts like hunger and sex. The paths of motor outlet or discharge are comparatively few and are fairly well defined. Specific bodily organs are conspicuously involved. Hence there is suggested the notion of a correspondingly separate psychic force or impulse. There are two fallacies in this assumption. The first consists in ignoring the fact that no activity (even one that is limited by routine habit) is confined to the channel which is most flagrantly involved in its execution. The whole organism is concerned in every act to some extent and in some fashion, internal organs as well as muscular, those of circulation, secretion, etc. Since the total state of the organism is never exactly twice alike, in so far the phenomena of hunger and sex are never twice the same in fact. The difference may be negligible for some purposes, and yet give the key for the purposes of a psychological analysis which shall terminate in a correct judgment of value. Even physiologically the context of organic changes accompanying an act of hunger or sex makes the difference between a normal and a morbid phenomenon.

In the second place, the environment in which the act takes place is never twice alike. Even when the overt organic discharge is substantially the same, the acts impinge upon a different environment and thus have different consequences. It is impossible to regard these differences of objective result as indifferent to the quality of the acts. They are immediately sensed if not clearly perceived; and they are the only _components of the meaning_ of the act. When feelings, dwelling antecedently in the soul, were supposed to be the causes of acts, it was natural to suppose that each psychic element had its own inherent quality which might be directly read off by introspection. But when we surrender this notion, it becomes evident that the only way of telling what an organic act is like is by the sensed or perceptible changes which it occasions. Some of these will be intra-organic, and (as just indicated) they will vary with every act. Others will be external to the organism, and these consequences are more important than the intra-organic ones for determining the quality of the act. For they are consequences in which others are concerned and which evoke reactions of favor and disfavor as well as cooperative and resisting activities of a more indirect sort.

Most so-called self-deception is due to employing immediate organic states as criteria of the value of an act. To say that it feels good or yields direct satisfaction is to say that it gives rise to a comfortable internal state. The judgment based upon this experience may be entirely different from the judgment passed by others upon the basis of its objective or social consequences. As a matter of even the most rudimentary precaution, therefore, every person learns to recognize to some extent the quality of an act on the basis of its consequences in the acts of others. But even without this judgment, the exterior changes produced by an act are immediately sensed, and being associated with the act become a part of its quality. Even a young child sees the smash of things occasionally by his anger, and the smash may compete with his satisfied feeling of discharged energy as an index of value.

A child gives way to what, grossly speaking, we call anger. Its felt or appreciated quality depends in the first place upon the condition of his organism at the time, and this is never twice alike. In the second place, the act is at once modified by the environment upon which it impinges so that different consequences are immediately reflected back to the doer. In one case, anger is directed say at older and stronger playmates who immediately avenge themselves upon the offender, perhaps cruelly. In another case, it takes effect upon weaker and impotent children, and the reflected appreciated consequence is one of achievement, victory, power and a knowledge of the means of having one's own way. The notion that anger still remains a single force is a lazy mythology. Even in the cases of hunger and sex, where the channels of action are fairly demarcated by antecedent conditions (or "nature"), the actual content and feel of hunger and sex, are indefinitely varied according to their social contexts. Only when a man is starving, is hunger an unqualified natural impulse; as it approaches this limit, it tends to lose, moreover, its psychological distinctiveness and to become a raven of the entire organism.

The treatment of sex by psycho-analysts is most instructive, for it flagrantly exhibits both the consequences of artificial simplification and the transformation of social results into psychic causes. Writers, usually male, hold forth on the psychology of woman, as if they were dealing with a Platonic universal entity, although they habitually treat men as individuals, varying with structure and environment. They treat phenomena which are peculiarly symptoms of the civilization of the West at the present time as if they were the necessary effects of fixed native impulses of human nature. Romantic love as it exists today, with all the varying perturbations it occasions, is as definitely a sign of specific historic conditions as are big battle ships with turbines, internal-combustion engines, and electrically driven machines. It would be as sensible to treat the latter as effects of a single psychic cause as to attribute the phenomena of disturbance and conflict which accompany present sexual relations as manifestations of an original single psychic force or _Libido_. Upon this point at least a Marxian simplification is nearer the truth than that of Jung.

Again it is customary to suppose that there is a single instinct of fear, or at most a few well-defined sub-species of it. In reality, when one is afraid the whole being reacts, and this entire responding organism is never twice the same. In fact, also, every reaction takes place in a different environment, and its meaning is never twice alike, since the difference in environment makes a difference in consequences. It is only mythology which sets up a single, identical psychic force which "causes" all the reactions of fear, a force beginning and ending in itself. It is true enough that in all cases we are able to identify certain more or less separable characteristic acts--muscular contractions, withdrawals, evasions, concealments. But in the latter words we have already brought in an environment. Such terms as withdrawal and concealment have no meaning except as attitudes toward objects. There is no such thing as an environment in general; there are specific changing objects and events. Hence the kind of evasion or running away or shrinking up which takes place is directly correlated with specific surrounding conditions. There is no one fear having diverse manifestations; there are as many qualitatively different fears as there are objects responded to and different consequences sensed and observed.

Fear of the dark is different from fear of publicity, fear of the dentist from fear of ghosts, fear of conspicuous success from fear of humiliation, fear of a bat from fear of a bear. Cowardice, embarrassment, caution and reverence may all be regarded as forms of fear. They all have certain physical organic acts in common--those of organic shrinkage, gestures of hesitation and retreat. But each is qualitatively unique. Each is what it is in virtue of its total interactions or correlations with other acts and with the environing medium, with consequences. High explosives and the aeroplane have brought into being something new in conduct. There is no error in calling it fear. But there is error, even from a limited clinical standpoint, in permitting the classifying name to blot from view the difference between fear of bombs dropped from the sky and the fears which previously existed. The new fear is just as much and just as little original and native as a child's fear of a stranger.

For any activity is original when it first occurs. As conditions are continually changing, new and _primitive_ activities are continually occurring. The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality are lost from view. This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing psychologist. The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically he reveals vital actualities. The scientific systematizer treats each act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory.

When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the varied ways in which they are modified through interactions with one another in response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activity there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging, explosive discharge--blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated--that is, become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, because of its dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be "suppressed."

Suppression is not annihilation. "Psychic" energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life. An isolated or spasmodic manifestation is a sign of immaturity, crudity, savagery; a suppressed activity is the cause of all kinds of intellectual and moral pathology. One form of the resulting pathology constitutes "reaction" in the sense in which the historian speaks of reactions. A conventionally familiar instance is Stuart license after Puritan restraint. A striking modern instance is the orgy of extravagance following upon the enforced economies and hardships of war, the moral let-down after its highstrung exalted idealisms, the deliberate carelessness after an attention too intense and too narrow. Outward manifestation of many normal activities had been suppressed. But activities were not suppressed. They were merely dammed up awaiting their chance.

Now such "reactions" are simultaneous as well as successive. Resort to artificial stimulation, to alcoholic excess, sexual debauchery, opium and narcotics are examples. Impulses and interests that are not manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in recreation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is interesting to note that there are two opposite forms. Some phenomena are characteristic of persons engaged in a routine monotonous life of toil attended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. Such men think too much, that is, too much along a _particular_ line. They carry too heavy responsibilities; that is, their offices of service are not adequately shared with others. They seek relief by escape into a more sociable and easy-going world. The imperative demand for companionship not satisfied in ordinary activity is met by convivial indulgence. The other class has recourse to excess because its members have in ordinary occupations next to no opportunity for imagination. They make a foray into a more highly colored world as a substitute for a normal exercise of invention, planning and judgment. Having no regular responsibilities, they seek to recover an illusion of potency and of social recognition by an artificial exaltation of their submerged and humiliated selves.

Hence the love of pleasure against which moralists issue so many warnings. Not that love of pleasures is in itself in any way demoralizing. Love of the pleasures of cheerfulness, of companionship is one of the steadying influences in conduct. But pleasure has often become identified with special thrills, excitations, ticklings of sense, stirrings of appetite for the express purpose of enjoying the immediate stimulation irrespective of results. Such pleasures are signs of dissipation, dissoluteness, in the literal sense. An activity which is deprived of regular stimulation and normal function is piqued into isolated activity, and the result is division, disassociation. A life of routine and of over-specialization in non-routine lines seek occasions in which to arouse by abnormal means a _feeling_ of satisfaction without any accompanying objective fulfilment. Hence, as moralists have pointed out, the insatiable character of such appetites. Activities are not really satisfied, that is fulfilled in objects. They continue to seek for gratification in more intensified stimulations. Orgies of pleasure-seeking, varying from saturnalia to mild sprees, result.

It does not follow however that the sole alternative is satisfaction by means of objectively serviceable action, that is by action which effects useful changes in the environment. There is an optimistic theory of nature according to which wherever there is natural law there is also natural harmony. Since man as well as the world is included in the scope of natural law, it is inferred that there is natural harmony between human activities and surroundings, a harmony which is disturbed only when man indulges in "artificial" departures from nature. According to this view, all man has to do is to keep his occupations in balance with the energies of the environment and he will be both happy and efficient. Rest, recuperation, relief can be found in a proper alternation of forms of useful work. Do the things which surroundings indicate need doing, and success, content, restoration of powers will take care of themselves.